Tim Maly

By Tim Maly May 2, 2013

The first thing you hear is the robot. The rhythmic beat of whirrs punctuated by brief silences reaches down the unmarked concrete halls of the Boston Design Center, letting you know you’re headed in the right direction. As you approach the entrance to Artaic’s offices, you pass by an open side door and the robot is right there — an industrial arm suspended off a steel frame, its tip zipping back and forth between a gridded sheet and rows of colored tiles. It grabs a piece and drops it on the grid, then grabs another and does the same and another and another. Whirr. Pick. Whirr. Drop. Whirr. Pick. Whirr. Drop.

Eventually, Ted Acworth will notice you standing there, mesmerized, and greet you. Acworth is founder and CEO of Artaic, and Artaic makes custom mosaics with a robot.

Acworth started Artaic in 2007 while working at MIT after finishing his PhD in mechanical engineering at Stanford. He’d already been involved in one start-up, Brontes Technologies, a 3-D dental imaging company that was acquired by 3M in 2006. “It was a big exit, classic textbook case,” he says. When it came to his next project, he wanted to do something more permanent, a company he could built. “I didn’t have a lot of passion for dental imaging.”

He did have some passion for mosaic, something he fell in love with while traveling in Europe during summers while in college. Mosaic is an ancient art form, dating back to Mesopotamia in 3,000 BCE. As methods for decorating your space goes, it has some significant advantages, the biggest being that it’s durable and looks classy. It has some downsides as well, the biggest being that it’s expensive and labor intensive. Extremely labor intensive.

Historically, all that labor had to be done on the ground, wherever the mosaic was being installed. Today, mosaics are often assembled in factories, mostly in China or India. Workers places the tiles on adhesive backing paper, which is then cut up and shipped to the installation place. There, installers line up the sheets, embed them in the grout and peel the tape away.

“I visited a factory to see how it works,” says Acworth. “I literally clocked two hours to make a square foot.” It’s a terrible job. Many modern mosaics are essentially giant bitmaps, with colored square tiles acting as pixels in a grid. Picture workers painstakingly completing a paint by numbers from hell, pixel by pixel.

Monotonous repetitive tasks are perfect for a robot. By mechanizing mosaic assembly, Artaic can make higher quality, lower cost mosaics than their overseas competitors. Once Acworth had satisfied himself that the size of the market for mosaics was good he hired Artaic co-founder and creative director Paul Reiss and together they set to work.

It makes sense, from a man who got his MBA in management of technology innovation from MIT’s Sloan business school.

“With any tech startup you know there is going to be this initial trench while you are developing the product,” says Acworth. They expected it would take around a year to get the robot online. At the same time, they had to get customers. Acworth decided to break in to the commercial market — large places like office buildings, hotels, and casinos are already used to buying mosaic, while the product’s been priced out of consumers’ interest. Developing those relationships is also a slow, long process. “We tried to time is so that at the moment the robot was ready, there would be customers ready to buy,” he says. “We’d kind of bluff our customers as we were developing the first project, saying ‘oh yeah, of course we can make that.’”

Perhaps they bluffed too well. “We made our first sale before the robot was ready,” says Reiss. “We made our first project by hand.” The resulting scramble meant living through the very work flow they were hoping to replace. It involved “a lot of pizza, beer, and nimble fingers,” says Reiss. “And a lot of student interns,” adds Acworth.

In time, the robot arm came completely online and took over the tedious work. But making a mosaic by hand is still a rite of passage at Artaic. “To this day, everybody that works here gets experience making a square foot by hand.” says Acworth.

Although the robot arm is the most mesmerizing part of Artaic’s mosaic process it’s actually the least impressive, says Acworth. “Pick and place robots have been around for decades. There are other things that are much more challenging like the software, inventory management, and loading tiles into the robot.”

Acworth’s success with overcoming those tasks show an innate expertise with designing a solution to a complex, international logistics challenge. “I took one course at MIT in supply chain management. That’s it,” he says. “But I’m an engineer so I like to figure out systems and solve problems.”

Other parts of his background have aided the company’s development too. Before his Ph.D, Acworth developed image processing systems for coronary research, writing code that would later help with Artaic’s image processing needs. His Ph.D work largely rotated around building a telescope calibration tool for NASA’s Gravity Probe B, a super-precise satellite that would be launched to a non-serviceable altitude. That project helped land him a two-season run as the host of History Channel’s UFO Hunters, the money from which being used towards the launch of Artaic.

The mosaics that Artaic makes are like giant bitmaps, generally with a resolution of about 2.5 DPI. (Acworth points out that it makes more sense to think in terms of dots per feet — their finest mosaics are 27 DPF). Where they are different from bitmaps is that unlike screens and print which can combine three colors to create just about any color, each pixel in a mosaic is a separate object made from different material in a different factory.

This could be natural stone marble quarried from Carrera Italy to body porcelain fired in a kiln in Arkansas,” says Acworth. These tiles all have different characteristics, from differences in finish and smoothness to the textures and striations that you see in stone or the iridescence of something like pearl. All told, Artaic handles about 7,000 different SKUs of tile, which seems like a lot until you start dividing them up by material, size, finish and color. (Artaic has six main lines that run in about 100 colors each, with two sizes and three finishes. Special tiles and other exceptions make up the rest.)

To tell the robot what to do, they created command line software that converted a design file into XML that the robot would understand. To help clients accurately envision what their order will look like, Acworth needed software that will accurately render a preview. To do that, Artaic has painstakingly built up a digital library of all the tiles it uses. When new tiles are added to the repertoire, they are carefully photographed — several tiles per color if it has veins or other complex textures — and added to the palettes.

“It’s like a throwback to the days of 256 web safe colors and DeBabelizer,” says Reiss. Except some pixels are twice as expensive as others and on back order for eight weeks.

It’s managing the inventory rather than the robot that Acworth says is Artaic’s secret sauce. Because each project is generally a one-off, it doesn’t suit them well to store bulk materials. They don’t know what they need until the order is finalized. Even with their lean approach, Acworth estimates that they have about 7-8 tonnes of tile on site at any given time, just for samples and rush jobs. So the design software needs to know what tile is available and how long it will take to get what they don’t have on hand.

Every tile as a supply story with it, says Acworth. “It’s kind of ridiculous how much data we connect on each and every SKU.” Reiss begins listing off the stats. “Product data, pricing, lead time, geometric information.” Acworth takes up the list. “How much we have. Here’s how long to get in by truck and the price. How much to get it by sea, how much to get in by air, and there are the blackout dates. All that is codified.”

Acworth’s goal is to have it so seamlessly integrated that salespeople on the road can adjust orders on the fly, perhaps replacing one kind of red tile with another one that’s close enough and might shave months of time or thousands of dollars off the final price, and then re-rendering it, like a version of Photoshop that instead of optimizing for file size, optimizes for shipping dates.

Because the robot is so fast, getting the tile usually takes longer than making the project. “We give them a three week lead time, and little do they know that two of those weeks are waiting for the tile to arrive,” says Acworth. Once they have all the supplies, the robot arm can build a mosaic about ten times faster than seasoned professionals can — but Acworth says that he’s building an entirely new robot that will drastically increase assembly speed, forecasted to build 16 times faster than the current machine.

Once the tile are in Artaic’s facilties, Acworth’s final challenge is keeping the robot fed. This turns out to be really hard. “Robots love structured things where everything is the same shape every time,” he says. “In a car factory the car body is exactly the same dimensions to a millimeter or two.” Tiles, on the other hand, are a tiny commodity product which have a huge variation in shape. On a quarter inch tile, a variation of a few millimeters means +/- 30% variation from nominal. Tiles can be chipped, or little bits of flashing can leak past the edge of the mold.

His first line of defense is by training their suppliers to meet Artaic’s needs. “They’re not used to people using a robot to assemble tiles,” says Acworth, “so we have to work with them to help them understand our process.” Subjecting shipments from any new supplier to digital image processing and photo spectrometry to ensure they are within the tolerances that Artaic needs. Inevitably, the first batch never is.

“Each one gets a very polite email with pictures and graphs,” says Acworth showing how the tiles they sent were outside the specifications. It’s partially a show of force. “By showing them scientific analysis we scare the crap out of them and from then on we get premium product because they know we’re serious.”

It’s all part of Acworth’s dream of world mosaic domination. If they can keep bringing the costs down, mosaics will become affordable not only for large casinos and mega hotels, but for regular consumers as well. Artaic has already experimented with making their product available in a retail store, with design software allowing DIY patterns, leading to an Ikea-like kit with pre-placed tiles and bottles of grout shipped to your door.

“Italy has been in the leader in mosaics for 3,000 years,” says Reiss, “Then there was a fifteen year window when labor went to India and China. Now we want to bring it to the US for the next 3,000 years.”

“We’re an art company on the outside and a tech company on the inside,” says Acworth. “Our customers come to us for art and service. Under the hood it’s these technologies that we’re developing every day that make us good at that.”